Time & Perspective Quote by William Petty

Petty opens with a shrug that’s really a power move: he borrows the cadence of Scripture to deny the comforting myth that outcomes reliably track merit. “The race being not to the swift” is Ecclesiastes repurposed as early modern social science - a reminder that talent and effort are only part of the causal story, and that “time and chance” are not moral failures but structural features of life. For an economist avant la lettre, it’s a declaration of method: don’t overfit your theory to tidy narratives of desert.

The second half turns humility into insulation. “I leave the Judgement of the whole to the Candid” flatters the reader into the role of fair-minded arbiter while pre-empting the predictable attacks of rivals, pamphleteers, and courtly partisans. Petty frames critique as “correction,” not condemnation; he signals he can take feedback, but only of a certain caliber. The line “of whose correction I shall never be impatient” isn’t just civility. It’s reputational strategy in a bruising intellectual marketplace: he welcomes revision to seem empirically serious, yet implies that only candid critics count, dismissing the rest as noise.

Context matters. Petty worked in a century of plague, war, and political whiplash - conditions that made randomness feel like governance by other means. His emerging “political arithmetic” aimed to measure the state, but this preface admits measurement can’t abolish contingency. It’s the economist’s oldest truth, delivered with a theologian’s rhythm: models may clarify, they won’t sanctify.